Muslim charity CAIR-NJ's back-to-school guide attributes 9/11 attacks to US support for Israel

The New Jersey branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the US’s largest Muslim charity, encouraged teaching students that the 9/11 terror attacks were due to “America’s support of Israel” and said, “terrorism is defined differently by different groups of people.”

CAIR-NJ released its new “Back to School Resource Guide” for parents and students for 2026-2027. The guide contains advice for Muslim students regarding their religious rights in schools, a section on “Discussing Palestine in the classroom,” and a page on “Muslim Studies: 9/11.”

The page reads: “The catastrophic events of 9/11 catapulted the Global War on Terror, marking an aggressive shift in US domestic and foreign policy and an erosion of civil liberties through the Patriot Act, which practically targeted Muslims.

“The 9/11 attacks also marked a renewed and egregious ‘othering’ of Muslims and those who may appear to be Muslim, which has been evident in mainstream media, on campaign trails, in literature and advertising, and even in the classroom.”

CAIR-NJ and Teaching While Muslim (TWM) said they developed a curriculum with tools to help teachers “adopt a more nuanced approach to 9/11 in their classrooms.”

Now-deleted document recovered

It then features a link to the 9/11 unit plan website, which has since been deleted by CAIR following earlier reporting by Jewish Onliner.

The CAIR National annual back-to-school guide (slightly different from the NJ one) now also features a note saying: “An earlier version of the document did not go through proper vetting and included a link to a primary source document that was removed in November 2025.”

The Jerusalem Post managed to obtain the now-deleted 9/11 document via the Wayback Machine.

The document is intended for use in elementary, middle, and high school social studies and English classes.

In its description of 9/11, the document said, “A group self-identifying as al-Qaeda hailing from the mountains of Afghanistan launched separate plane hijackings that ended up in different cities, causing the death of almost 3,000 people, and the resulting debris from the fallen towers caused lasting health issues in first responders.”

Children's guide says 9/11 launched in response to US support of Israel

It then cites the 9/11 Commission Report as saying that al-Qaeda “launched the attacks in response to America’s support of Israel, their involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and the vast presence of the US military in the Middle East.”

It is important to note that while page 362 of the report does identify US support for Israel and American military presence in the Middle East as among the grievances that helped fuel al-Qaeda’s extremism, it at no point says 9/11 was in response to these things.

The CAIR-NJ resource then says, “Though 9/11 was not the first attack on the United States, it was a major event that marked an aggressive shift in US domestic and foreign policy, sparking the War on Terror in the Middle East.”

Furthermore, it says, “Terrorism is defined differently by different groups of people.” While this doesn’t explicitly state that 9/11 was not terrorism, it does imply it.

Moreover, at no point in the resource does it say 9/11 was an act of terrorism. It says instead that “American Muslims, Islamic scholars, and governments in Muslim-majority countries condemned the attacks.”

The unit then argues that 9/11 resulted in a “stark shift in US policy and state-sponsored Islamophobia in the US and abroad.”

In a sidebar next to this are three bullet points: “Not all terrorists are Muslims, and not all Muslims are terrorists; how a country treats other people is an extension of their values and beliefs; Islam does not advocate for violence.”

Osama bin Laden portrayed as freedom fighter

It also speaks quite glowingly of Osama bin Laden: “The US fought the Soviet Union, who had invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, by supporting the rebels that stood up against the Russian invaders, including a man named Osama bin Laden and people who later formed the Taliban.”

Also interesting is that some of the resource links at the end of the now-deleted document have been deleted or archived as well.

The Post managed to access most of them via archival search engines.

One speaks about the Muslim veil after 9/11 and says “the September 11 terrorist attacks transformed the meaning of the Muslim headscarf. It now ‘marks’ them as representatives of the suspicious, inherently violent, and forever foreign ‘terrorist other’ in our midst.”

The resource also bizarrely links to the film V for Vendetta, which is about a young woman living in a dystopian society who meets a shadowy freedom fighter plotting to overthrow their tyrannical government, and it also suggests students read the full text of Bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”